Comment by the__alchemist

Comment by the__alchemist 2 days ago

An (agarose?) gel.

There are partial holes in at at one end. You insert a small amount of dyed DNA (etc) containing solution each. Apply an electrical potential across the gel. DNA gradually moves along. Smaller DNA fragments move faster. So, at a given time, you can coarsely measure fragment size of a given sample. Your absolute scale is given by "standards", aka "ladders" that have samples of multiple, known sizes.

The paper authors cheated (allegedly) by copy + pasting images of the gel. This is what was caught, so it implies they may have made up some or all results in this and other papers.

shpongled 2 days ago

Close - this is a SDS-PAGE gel, and you run it using proteins. The bands in the first two rows are from a western blot (gel is transferred to a membrane), where you use antibodies against those specific proteins to detect them. The Pon S row is Ponceau S, a dye that non-specifically detects all proteins - so it's used as a loading control, to make sure that the same amount of total protein is loaded in each lane of the gel.

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doctorpangloss 2 days ago

Is it conceivable that the control was run once because the key result came from the same run? I can see a reviewer asking for it in all three figures, whereas they may drafted it only in one

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- gus_massa 2 days ago
  
  The horizontal label is fine, it says Pon S in all images. (I guess a wrong label would be obvious to detect for specialists.)
  The problem are the vertical labels
  In Figure 1e it says: "MT1+2", "MT2" and "MT1"
  In Figure 3a it says: "5'-CR1", "CR2" and "3'-UTR"
  In Figure 3b it says: "CR2", "CR3" and "CR4"
  
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- shpongled 2 days ago
  
  Based on the images, it is inconceivable that these are from the same run (see the dramatically different levels of TRF-S in each gel. One column/lane = one sample). This isn't something that would be included because of a reviewer - loading controls are required to meaningfully interpret the results (e.g. the data is useless without such a control).
  
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NotAnOtter 2 days ago

Additional context to be speculative of OP's intentions. Within the academic world there was a major scandal where a semi-famous researcher was exposed for faking decades of data (Google: Pruitt). Every since, people have been hungry for more drama of the same shape.